NAIROBI, Kenya, August 23 (UNHCR) – The UN refugee agency has sent a team of experts in several disciplines to a remote area of eastern Ethiopia where some 18,000 Somali refugees are in urgent need of aid after fleeing their country. The UNHCR team sent to Gode includes specialists in health, nut...

With the crisis in the Horn of Africa continuing, UNCHR has noted an evolving displacement pattern during August with fewer Somalis displaced within Somalia or into Kenya or Ethiopia, but rising arrivals in Yemen. In Somalia, UNHCR’s Population Movement Tracking (PMT) partners have reported a sig...

UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres is on a three-day visit to the Horn of Africa to show solidarity with displaced Somalis during Eid il-Fitr. Over the Eid period, UNHCR is airlifting 240 metric tonnes of aid from Saudi Arabia to Somalia. The assistance comprises dry goods and spe...

In Kenya, this coming Monday marks the start of the new school term and at Dadaab, the largest refugee complex in the world, some 40,000 refugee children are preparing to go to school - many for the first time. The influx of 154,000 new refugees from Somalia this year, more than half of whom are chi...

UNHCR is becoming extremely concerned about the increasingly poor health state of recent Somali arrivals in Ethiopia. At the Kobe camp, in the Dollo Ado area, medical screening of new arrivals is recording severe acute malnutrition among 19 percent of children. At nearby Hilaweyn, the rate is 16 pe...

Somali children are the biggest victims of the refugee crisis in the Horn of Africa, according to the latest profiling data collected by UNHCR in Ethiopia. The most recent demographic breakdown of the Somali influx into Ethiopia shows that children under the age of 18 are the largest age group amon...

Amid assessments of a somewhat improved security situation in some parts of Somalia, UNHCR is scaling up its presence in Somalia’s border regions and in Mogadishu. Yesterday, a UNHCR team undertook a mission to Liboi (Kenya) and Dobley (Lower Juba), which is the main transit point on the route to Da...

The head of UNHCR’s Executive Committee, Ambassador Hisham Badr of Egypt, will be visiting refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya starting this Sunday week to see for himself the situation there amid the ongoing crisis in the Horn of Africa. <p>The visit follows High Commissioner António Guterres’ m...

DOLLO ADO, Ethiopia, September 30 (UNHCR) – When Hassen Ibrahim arrived recently in Ethiopia, the teenager had not seen his parents for more than two years. "As the eldest son, I stayed behind to take care of my grandmother, who was too sick to travel," explained the 15-year-old, shortly after cross...

IFO EXTENSION, Kenya, September 19 (UNHCR) – In a windy desert camp, two women vigorously insult each other over who will be the first to fill their plastic can with water. Either side of a standpipe, they hurl epithets. For much of their lives, the women have been accustomed to travelling several k...